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Bulgarian Green Variations

Late last year Raiko sent a shipment of Bulgarian greens to the UK. These were either fish that were 50% Manacapuru blood, or bg combined with Philippine blue. At this stage I am yet to breed from these particular fish so my assumptions on their genetics are based purely on their observed phenotypes, however, as I breed from these fish I will update this thread based on my observations :-

I believe this to be one of the 50% manacapuru fish and I'm guessing that it's D/+ - bg/bg

by contrast I believe this is a D/D - bg/bg

Next what I believe to be D/+ - pb/pb - bg/bg

and finally, what I believe to be D/D - pb/pb - bg/bg

One thing which these photos clearly demonstrate, bg clearly offers potential for new phenotypes beyond the "classic" "seal point".

Here we are in 2017 and Progress on the Bulgarian Geen Front has been slow....

Firstly I paired what I believed was a D/D - pb/pb - bg/bg male with a female S/+ - V/+ - pb/pb
This pairing resulted in just 3 surviving fish, all I believe pinoys and all female.

Secondly I paired what I believed was a D/+ - pb/pb - bg/bg female with a male koi which I knew carried a pb gene. As expected I got a mixture of blue, silver, black & pinoy phenotypes. A slightly better success rate than the previous batch with 30 or so survivors. i didn't carry out phenotype counts, but the mix of blue to non blue seems to be approx 50:50 which suggests that I was correct in my assessment of the female.

Next I paired 2 of the females from the first batch with different males, the one female was paired to a blue smokey and produced a decent batch of all blue & pinoy offspring, proving that she is definitely a pinoy.
Her sister, the only veiltail survivor was also paired to a blue individual, but only one individual survived, a blue zebra. I am confident this individual is a pinoy, but cannot say so with 100% certainty. I can say she's a beautiful fish, as she won last year's photo competition http://www.theangelfishsociety.org/p...232-03&cat=524
I have now paired this same female with a black male from the second pairing

I think the pairing is thus D/(g or possibly Gm) - S/+ - +/+ - +/pb - +/dg x D/+ - +/+ - V/+ - pb/pb - +/dg
Obviously there are going to be an awful lot of genotypes from this pairing, but two of the things I'm hoping for is :-
1. veiltail Bulgarian Greens (I'm interested to see how the bg expresses on the longer veiltail fins.
2. a mix of D/D, D/(g or Gm), D/+ and +/(g or Gm) Bulgarian Greens, in both pb/pb and +/pb combinations. I'm hoping that seeing all produced from the same parents will make it easier to distinguish between the different types.

It's early days, they've only been free swimming for 3 days, but so far it appears to be a substantial batch and the parents are doing exceptionally well :-

At this stage there's not much that can be said about the pigmentation of the youngsters other than there appears to be a roughly 50:50 mix of darker & lighter ones.
In theory D/+ X D/g should produce 75% Dark, but assuming 25% of those are Bulgarian greens and pheotypically lighter than their siblings, that gives and expected ratio of 56.25: 43.75 which is near what I think I'm observing.

Fingers crossed that these continue to thrive, I will update in due course.

My efforts have stalled out as well. Suffered many losses last summer due to water issues. Lost my DD x Manacapuru BG pair sadly. But was able to save a handful of their offspring as well as both pb/pb x bg/bg pairs.

While both Blue BG pairs survived, they both stopped spawning. Spent last fall trying to improve their health. Started spawning again but no survivors. Then finally success in January with a sizeable spawn. But this spawn suddenly died out at 2 weeks free swimming. And I may have 20 survivors. Fingers crossed they survive and I can get more spawns from this pair.

I also have 2 new Manacapuru BG angels. They should be maturing soon. Hoping one is a female I can pair with my male Manacapuru BG that is currently unpaired.

As I know the first Manacapuru BG carried pb, I plan on doing tests with some type of pb angels to determine if I have one without pb. If I'm so lucky, can then work to isolate bg through the Manacapuru line as well as continuing to work toward adding D to the other line I started to get to a true BSP.

One thing I find amazing is how much green I'm getting on the DD outcrosses. In fact most of them also show the existence of the Streaked gene. A gene I haven't worked with. So should be fun and interesting!

Time for an update.
sorry for the quality of some of the photos which are moderate at best, with the exception of the first two, all were taken today.

Generally I'm very pleased with the progress of this batch, with very few losses thus far. The parents did an excellent job, so I left them with the youngsters until 22nd February, at which point the youngsters had been free swimming for just over 3 weeks, these photos were taken on their last day together :-

Generally growth has been good, but look closely at the photos above and you'll see that there is a lot of variation and a good few runts (many, but not all, of these are dark and therefore presumably black or double dark, which have a reputation for slow growth).

Initially the parents were housed in one half of an approx. 40 imperial gallon (roughly 50 US gallons) aquarium. When the youngsters went free swimming, I removed the pair from the other side as I was concerned that some babies might slip through. To avoid stressing the pair, I left the partition in place, and in fact, the partition proved baby proof. When I removed the parents, I decided to try to separate the larger youngsters to the other side of the partition, but after a couple of weeks I decided to remove the partition and give them all free range of the tank.

Since my initial post I've realised that the male also carried a smokey gene. I'm still undecided on whether he carries a gold or gold marble gene, but suspect the latter as I've seen a couple of fry who appear to have some marbling, but at this at this stage I can't be sure.

What has been puzzling me is that there appear to be a number of golden individuals :-

Whilst others are variations on silver, some starting to show smokey:-

This puzzled me, as it shouldn't be possible to get black, gold and silver from 2 parent fish where each has a dark gene. However some of these are showing hints of black in the fins & I suspect these are the BSP's. Time will hopefully tell.

In the mean time, here are some more photos showing the range of phenotypes I'm going to have to sort through...

this one is obviously pb/pb, but what else besides?:-

Really not sure about this next one, but again, definitely homozygous for pb.

Hopefully in another month or so I will have a clearer picture of what's what. By that stage I'll probably have had to split them into 2 tanks, so I may have had the opportunity to do a few phenotype counts as well. I must say I'm not looking forward to the counting part!